Excerpt
"I am watching a thousand feathers--grey partridge feathers--floating high on the surface of the pond in front of the cabin I pretend to work in. I have plucked a million feathers from the bodies of all the grey partridge I have cooked in my life, beautiful golden-brown feathers that match the fall colors of the cypress tress that grow on the edge of my pond. It is November and all at once winter includes me. On the porch of the cabin there is a wooden rocking chair, weathered and comfortable, that I sit in every day. On quiet afternoons I think about the slowing growth of the loblolly pines I have been watching for twenty years, the everchanging face of the pond now active with fish, and the condition of the natural world outside of my custody. Today I watch a young osprey hunting below the level of the pine trees glide past the dock. He cocks a disinterested head at the intrusion of feathers drifting on the surface of the water while I comtemplate, with ambivalence, what I know about grey partirdge and what they have meant to me. I have hunted at least one hour a day for three months a year, ever since I was eight years old. That translates into more than 5,000 hours in the field, a lifetime walk that, under different circumstances, might have taken me from Paris to Istanbul and back. If to this hike I add the time I have spent shooting--shotguns at clay pegeons and birds, air rifles at my parents' horses, the farmer's cows and pigs and chickens, and my sister's and her friends' asses--I can safely assume that I have had my hands on the stock of a gun for one whole year of the sixty-plus that I have been around. I like to walk, and I know guns." From the introduction to THE FRAGRANCE OF GRASS